Load, Web Server Performance Testing with Apache Bench

If you run a website or blog(WordPress etc) using Apache, you can measure the performance of your site using ApacheBench. ApacheBench is a http load generating tool which will show how many requests per second the server is capable of serving.

ab tool (ApacheBench) comes bundled with the standard Apache source distribution. You can use the shell command line to test your own results with the ApacheBench program.

Type at the command line:

/usr/sbin/ab -n 40 -c 4 http://yahoo.com/

You can see how fast yahoo.com can handle 40 requests, with a maximum of 4 requests running concurrently: